[Whenever] some ass tells you about how we “need” government to prevent anarchy, remember [that]…the truth is, we need anarchy to protect us from government. – “Tiger, Tiger”
Every year on this day, I remind my readers that nations are as mortal as individuals, if a bit longer-lived, and that every country anyone can name was built on the ashes of an earlier empire now gone to dust. But I’ve said that enough times now, and the older essays are there for you to read; just follow the links above. This time, I want to address a bit of political ignorance I’ve seen popping up quite frequently lately: namely, the pretense that anarchism is actually “socialism”. This isn’t to say that there is no such thing as social anarchy, because of course there is. But that’s a voluntary cooperation between individuals without any coercion; it’s not at all the same thing as socialism, which is just another form of coercive top-down tyranny in which an elite enforces its diktats on the masses at gunpoint.
I recently saw a tweet about dozens of farmers harvesting crops for the family of a neighbor who died in a motorcycle crash; the moron referred to it as “socialism”. But there was no government forcing these farmers to help; there were no laws saying they had to, no bureaucrats administrating the help, no cut taken to pay for “supervision”, no army of thugs threatening the neighbors who didn’t chip in, and most importantly no standing structure sucking up resources like an immense tumor whether it was needed or not. This act of neighborly kindness wasn’t “socialism”, any more than a barn-raising or a husking bee or any other form of rural co-operation which existed for millennia before Marx started vomiting out his industrial-age fantasies of ant-like “workers” seizing factories built by others. No, it was anarchism; spontaneous grass-roots order with no “leaders” claiming credit and diverting resources to built monuments to themselves. I described another example in “Tiger, Tiger“; jackasses were referring to grass-roots resistance to a tyrants’s proclamations as “democracy”, when in actuality “democracy” was the means by which the aforementioned tyrant came to power (and the institution protecting him from the lynching he deserves). No, once again that was anarchism; nobody forced those lawyers to donate their time and energy, and nobody was standing over them with guns demanding they do it in some way decided on by pompous “leaders” who never did that kind of work in their lives.
Some of you may pooh-pooh the idea of people running their own lives, working together for mutual benefit without the help of “leaders” or “officials” or “organizers” or bosses or commissars or bureaucrats of any kind; some of you refuse to accept that government is at best a barely-necessary evil, and in most cases just a plain evil. People who believe in this kind of rubbish are the same ones who, even if they understand that criminalization of sex work is harmful, oppose decriminalization and instead dream of a bureaucratic regime of licenses, women confined to brothels, mandatory “health checks” and other “regulation” presided over by the same cops who are caught raping women literally every single week. But if you are one of those, would you like me to tell you how I know for a fact that you’re wrong? It’s because I’m a member of a functioning anarchistic subculture, namely the demimonde. No “official” designed the system of references and co-operation among sex workers; we did that ourselves. We don’t need posters of scowling thugs threatening us into working together on pain of violence; in fact, those thugs are the chief threat our mutual anarchistic cooperation is designed to protect us from.
No “expert” appointed by elected “leaders” tells us what our prices should be, which services we should offer and which clients we should or shouldn’t see; each of us determines that for herself, and economic forces bring it all into a rough balance. Is our system perfect? Not by a long shot. But if you believe in “democracy”, consider this: in every legalized regime in the world, over 90% – in Nevada it’s greater than 99% – prefer to work illegally, in the systems whores design and maintain ourselves, rather than in the tyrannical, abusive “legal” regimes designed for us by those who imagine themselves our “betters”. That’s a landslide vote for anarchism, and yet those who pretend to believe in “democracy” refuse to accept it.
